The New York Times
Opinion
Let Trump Have a Miserable Little Christmas
Deck the halls with tons of tweeting.
By Gail Collins
Opinion Columnist
Dec. 11, 2019
Hey, it looks like we’ll have impeachment before Christmas. Talk about the holiday spirit.
“They said these two things — they’re not even a crime!” Donald Trump shrieked after Democratic leaders announced the House was going to vote on whether he should be impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. This was at one of his trademark rallies during which he also referred to F.B.I. agents as “scum” and claimed that Elizabeth Warren’s marriage was a “phony, disgusting deal.”
Ho, ho, ho.
Truly we live in not-boring times. Fifty years from now, kids who’ve been watching all this action from their college dorms will be able to answer their grandchildren’s questions about Trump’s bad hair and worse values. Advanced placement high school students might be writing profiles of Jerry Nadler.
There’s been so much action that almost nobody noticed this week when the New York attorney general announced Trump has coughed up $2 million to repay money he stole from his foundation. O.K., “stole” is pretty harsh. What would you call it if somebody established a charity and then used a large chunk of other people’s donations to buy portraits of himself — one six feet tall — purchase sports memorabilia and pay off legal settlements for his private businesses?
Still waiting for the word …
The Trump charity scandal is an old story, but the impeachment process puts it in a new light. Particularly if you combine it with the money he’s piling up from his Scottish golf resort (thank you Air Force visitors), the Washington hotel (welcome, Saudi officials) and from what the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington estimated were more than 2,300 conflicts of interest between his personal finances and his day job.
A dreadful leader plus a greedy crook: It really does give us a leg up in the drive to make sure Trump goes down in history as the worst president ever. That honor’s traditionally gone to James Buchanan, who floundered in the run-up to the Civil War.
“Unlike Trump, Buchanan was a generous man,” said Robert Strauss, who happens to be the author of a biography of Buchanan titled “Worst. President. Ever.” Buchanan “took in college students who couldn’t afford their room and board,” Strauss added. He never reneged on a debt.
It was published in October 2016. Strauss is still sticking with Buchanan, whom he calls “a nice guy put in the wrong job.” Obviously, secession tops being laughed at by leaders of other democratic powers at a cocktail party. But Trump could qualify for the bottom of the barrel if you throw in personal behavior and presume it’s better to be a nice guy in the wrong job than an awful guy in the wrong job.
Andrew Johnson was another awful president and history’s impeachment star until now, but he was praised for his financial integrity. “After becoming president, when prominent New York merchants tried to give him a magnificent carriage and span of horses he refused the gift,” noted Brenda Wineapple, the author of a history of the Johnson impeachment. “‘Those occupying high official positions,’ he politely said, must ‘decline the offerings of kind and loyal friends.’”
Money always comes up somewhere in this story. “To Impeach a President who has proved through results, to have one of the most successful presidencies ever, and most importantly, who has done NOTHING wrong, is sheer Political Madness!” Trump himself wrote in an email to his supporters this week, adding quickly that he was activating “Emergency Double-Match on All Contributions.”
The House is expected to vote on impeachment sometime next week, before everybody goes home for the holidays. There have been some delays — you can’t keep members of Congress from going off to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge. Or, um, weekends.
While everybody’s waiting, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been moving some other stuff along. That trade deal with Mexico and Canada, and the Democrats’ plan to control the price of prescription drugs.
Do you think that’s a good plan? Some people don’t like the idea of distracting attention from the president’s evildoing. Take your pick:
A) Nobody should talk about anything but the terribleness of Donald Trump. I sculpted his head out of mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving and squished gravy all over it.
B) I started listening to the Judiciary debate the other day, fell asleep and missed my dinner date. Give these poor people a change of subject for a few hours.
C) Anything Nancy Pelosi does is a good idea. I never thought about her at all until a few months ago, but now I believe she’s a combination of Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Curie and Meryl Streep.
Amazing times, huh? Of course, watching the impeachment drama loses a little zip when you remember that the Senate Republicans are never actually going to toss the president out of office. But that’s a story for 2020. Meanwhile, the holidays have to be a little bit brighter when you contemplate the fact that Donald Trump is definitely not having his best Christmas ever.
David Leonhardt
© 2019 The New York Times Company
{What is going on, really?
The quick bet conjoin two very real possibilities in contradictionary tests between political correctness and transparency.
On one hand , the clarity is anything but, a contradiction in terms, which most Nowedays are too keen to understand. The other, more substantive, and procedural, involved a very classy form of deception- go for the obviously contradictory of white nationalism- supposing they will buy it, and pass it along as contentively negative within a goal constructed objective, that transcends it’s self.
So the contradiction in terms will swallow it’s own material tail. Socialism will be devoured within a hidden subjective (subjugatory) process.
In fact it is the foreign policy contradiction, that pits Russian territorial demands against Ukraine’s ,
with the former advocating. NWO inscribed in an oligarchian constitution, as the latter views the antithetically formal dialectic of conserving the teratorially gained objectives of the recent past.
What fuels the objective criteria , becoming less and not more transparent, setting in motion of the swelling of it’s execution?
The growing paradoxical synthesis between capital and labor has in certain respects rests within an increasingly schizmatic position of constructed ambiguity, and is reflected in the equally strained political agendas of both points of view.
That the subjective-objective determinative processes are informed by the public’s mass psychologically fragmented view of social coherence ; is fairly obvious , with the optically contradictory lack of awareness.
Trumpism really rests on a backdrop of international fusing, geared toward the processes of objective construction of simulated factors, that can transcend the limiting gaps , which appear controlling the processes which , inter alia are suggestive of white nationalistic dominance and control, of economic and political criteria.
But are they so? Aren’t they the psychological trigger, to optically illusive power motives, which apply more to the white power brokers who head Forbes 500 international corporations, intent on capitalizing on broader international markets, while tuting regional and anti international principles?
The contradiction is obvious, and very significant, as the former Democratic South has become the backbone of Republican strength.
The question of slavery has become more generic, constituting extending to broad factors that signal gaps between the economically advantaged versus the disadvantaged, rather than those which narrowly factored segregated ethnic groups .
Can the forces generated , reach levels that precipitated the forces that led to the civil war? The amount of repression is fueled by the relative naivete of those whose assumption of power is transcended from institutions of faith based ideas , this is why the constituted original intent of the founding father’s literal meaning has been put under the microscope of axiomatic analysis.
This is why demands for procedural lack is put forward as weaknesses in equivocating meaning of applying rules to content. The substantiality of material dialectical antithesis is clothed in verbatim contradiction, necessitating Trumpism to have developed a new style of political grandstanding ( tweeting) that can make objective assessment of using contra indicative , fallacious presentations almost common place.
The Democrats can not arrange an optical illusive demonstration on the same level , therefore they have to diminish the significance of Ukraine’s corruption at par with Russia’s.
That Trump is as involved in corruption with the Russian oligarchs, as the charge against the Ukraine oligarchs who stole US military funds funding the fight between the Russians and the Ukranians, is the real picture emerging from an international swamp, that is not fueled by party affiliation. That much is pretty clear, and the premise that Russia manufactured the Ukrainian meddling , is equally tenuous, albeit, even if true, is a minor one, set to distract from the major one.
The major premise, the one which only philosophers can fathom, is, that the dialectical materialism, it’s loss after the fall of Communism, had directed an unprecedented conflict that outed the topical maps of the limited neuro-lingual descriptions of their very basic weaknesses .
Such which were aptly described against Russel’s ’ sense-data’ a basic idea that fell sense, common sense, the sense of social democratic ideas into the abyss of Das Capital.
Capital swallowed a nationalistic synthetic, simply because it has reached limits. The internationalistic necessity to absorb other national economies, heretofore existent even from the early 1950’ s, reached the climactic stage of today’s politicall and economic conflict, that only a pathetic comedian could pull off.}